Tutorial: Creating a Moving Timelapse Effect in Adobe After Effects CC
This tutorial will demonstrate an advanced method of adding a slider or jib effect to timelapse footage in Adobe After Effects CC 2014.
Enabling Frame Blending
Next, we're going to turn on a few other options to give this time-lapse a little more production value. We'll start with enabling the Frame Blending options (Figure 5, below). This will smooth out the transitions between all the frames in our time-lapse. We'll enable this both universally and for our clip itself. Select the Toggle Switches/Modes button (Figure 6, below Figure 5) at the bottom of the window if you do not see the frame blending option.
Figure 5. Enabling Frame Blending
Figure 6. The Toggle Switches/Modes button
You can see what things look like after this step at the 1:55 mark in the tutorial video.
Enabling Motion Blur
Next, we'll enable another option called Motion Blur (Figure 7, below). Again, we'll do this universally and then also to the clip itself. You can see the effect in the RAM preview at the 2:09 mark in the tutorial video.
Figure 7. Enabling Motion Blur
Adding the Slider/Jib Effect
Just with these two options enabled, we start to see a powerful sense of motion in this time-lapse. Now, we're ready to add the slider or jib effect to this project. As a reminder, we have extra pixels to work with since we have 2K source footage. Now, we can reposition our video and have it move over time by adding a few keyframes.
With the clip selected, press P to reveal the Position values (Figure 8, below). Make sure the playhead is at the beginning of your clip. Now we can begin to reposition our video. We want to start from the upper left and then pan and tilt down to the right. We'll enable keyframes by clicking the watch button to the left of the Position values and adjust our starting values.
Figure 8. Position values revealed and ready to adjust.
Next, we'll right-click our starting keyframe and choose Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease Out (Figure 9, below). Next, we'll move to the nine-second area where we want our move to land. Here, again, we can reposition the video by adjusting our values to the left and to the right.
Figure 9. Choosing Easy Ease Out to begin our motion smoothly
We’ll smooth out our next keyframe by right-clicking and choosing Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease In. You can see the keyframed movement in a RAM preview at the 3:14 mark of the tutorial video.
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